The following content is brought to you by Lifehacker partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation.

You spent hours carving a perfectly frightful jack-o’-lantern for Halloween. Now you just need to light it up somehow for maximum scare factor. 

Maybe you plan on using electric candles or tea lights to glow up your scary gourd. If you choose the more traditional route of lighting your pumpkin with a real candle, however, you definitely want to follow some fire-safety protocols.

BIC EZ LOAD Lighter

$10.65

$14.20
Save $3.55

$10.65

$14.20
Save $3.55

Carving your pumpkin is only half the battle, but you should also be careful when lighting the candle inside. This is where a reloadable BIC EZ LOAD Lighter can come in handy. The long, thin wand easily gets into your jack-o’-lantern—and your grill, fireplace, and campfires. Now through Oct. 31, you can even save 25% on two BIC EZ LOAD starter kits with the code SPOOKY25.* 

Be smart about lighting your pumpkin’s candle

If you’re going old-school and using a real candle this year, make sure your pumpkin is sitting on a flat, stable surface so that it won’t tip over. Cut a good-sized hole in the gourd’s lid to let the heat from the candle escape, and put in a squatty votive candle, no tapered types. Use the BIC EZ LOAD Lighter to light the candle from a safe distance, and then place the lid ajar so that smoke can get out. Never leave a burning candle unattended.

Extinguish and relight up to 15,000* times

Another Halloween-night safety trick is to blow out your pumpkin’s candle—and all candles—in between groups of trick-or-treaters. As the first reloadable lighter in the BIC lineup, the BIC EZ LOAD ensures you’re always able to brighten any moment in three easy steps.

Whenever the lighter wand is running low on fuel, all you have to do is pop open the bottom cap and replace it with a new BIC Maxi Pocket Lighter. Providing up to 15,000* lights, the BIC EZ LOAD Lighter is conveniently replaceable up to 10 times with a BIC Maxi Pocket Lighter.

Safe, reliable lighting for Halloween and beyond

The BIC EZ LOAD Lighter will be lighting the moment for many of your Halloweens, backyard bonfires, and camping trips to come. In addition to being reloadable, each lighter goes through over 50 quality checks and meets BIC’s stringent safety standards. 

Now through Oct. 31, nab two BIC EZ LOAD starter kits, with two BIC Maxi Pocket Lighters included, at 25% off with code SPOOKY25.

DISCLAIMERS:

*Based on reloading up to 10x with BIC Maxi.

*25% off orders $40+ through midnight ET on October 31st, 2025.

Computer scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have proved that pricing algorithms can drive up prices even when they lack the capacity to collude. Aaron Roth and four colleagues studied so-called no-swap-regret algorithms, which are designed to minimize losses and were previously thought to guarantee competitive pricing. The researchers found that when such an algorithm faces an opponent using a nonresponsive strategy — one that randomly selects from predetermined price probabilities without reacting to competitor moves — both players can end up in equilibrium at high prices.

Neither has an incentive to switch strategies because their profits are nearly equal and as high as possible under the circumstances. The nonresponsive strategy cannot express threats because it does not respond to opponent behavior, yet it effectively coaxes the learning algorithm into raising prices. Mallesh Pai, an economist at Rice University not involved in the research, said the finding matters because regulators have no clear grounds to intervene without evidence of threats or agreements. Roth conceded however that he lacks a solution to the regulatory challenge his team identified.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo is teaming up with Laced Records on a couple of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild vinyl soundtrack releases, which is pretty darned cool. There’s even a massive 8-LP box set that ships with some franchise-friendly bells and whistles.

Let’s start with that box set. It’s available in limited-edition colored vinyl or standard black vinyl. At eight vinyl records, it probably includes just about every piano twinkle and wind rustle found throughout the game. All told, there are 130 newly remastered tracks.

The records here are split into themes, mirroring a player’s progression through Hyrule. These themes “revolve around exploring the Kingdom of Hyrule, freeing the Divine Beasts from Calamity Ganon’s hold and discovering the mysteries of the Shrines.”

It ships with a nifty-looking collector’s case and comes with 16 art prints depicting various scenes from the game. The 8-LP collection costs $195, which is high but not the worst deal in the world. That breaks down to around $24 per record.

Nintendo/Laced Records

The double-LP collection is a more standard affair, with 34 tracks pulled from throughout the game. These include musical cues from visiting the Great Fairy Fountain, Hyrule Castle and other locations. This one costs $50 and is also available in both black and colored vinyl.

Both collections are available to pre-order right now via Laced Records and My Nintendo Store. They won’t be shipped until June 19, 2026.

This is one of the first major Nintendo game soundtracks available in a physical format outside of Japan. Breath of the Wild is an interesting choice here for an initial vinyl release, given that the game’s soundtrack is known for mood-setting vibes but not really known for bops.

Composers Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, Hajime Wakai and Soshi Abe filled the game with gentle piano riffs, nature sounds and rhythmic pieces to accompany battles. However, it does have a few absolute bangers.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-is-releasing-a-massive-breath-of-the-wild-vinyl-soundtrack-collection-on-eight-lps-151531479.html?src=rss

Grammarly is no more, at least with regards to its name. The AI-powered writing assistance tool founded in 2009 has been absorbed into a new software platform called Superhuman. It follows Grammarly’s acquisition of Superhuman Mail earlier this year, with the former taking the somewhat unusual step of adopting its newly obtained company’s name, rather than the other way around.

Superhuman unites Grammarly, Superhuman Mail and the AI work assistant Coda (also acquired by Grammarly in 2025) in one productivity suite, allowing users to access all three tools as part of a single plan. The company has also launched a new AI assistant called Superhuman Go that is included in every Superhuman plan tier and is baked into the Grammarly browser extension for Chrome and Edge.

Superhuman Go’s capabilities include assisting with professional-sounding email responses, fetching information and scheduling meetings. At launch it can connect to your Google Workspace apps and Microsoft Outlook, with the idea being that the AI is always there making suggestions in the background, rather than you needing to ask it for assistance.

Superhuman plans to add additional functionality to Coda and Superhuman Mail, such as turning ideas from meetings into drafts and more effectively organizing your inbox according to your schedule. Its vision for the rebrand is that instead of thinking of Grammarly as a writing agent alone, you utilize all of its different agents and platforms to work more productively.

Anyone previously using Grammarly can now use Superhuman Go, and the Superhuman suite is being bundled into a number of different plans. The $12 per month (billed annually) Pro plan offers unlimited paragraph rewrites and translations in 19 languages — a feature Grammarly added earlier this year — while the Business plan costs $33 per month (billed annually) and includes Superhuman’s mail client.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/grammarly-has-rebranded-to-superhuman-151001417.html?src=rss

Amazon Games is winding down support for New World: Aeternum amid layoffs in the division and even deeper job cuts across its parent company. The game debuted on PC in 2021 and it landed on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S just over a year ago.

“After four years of steady content updates and a major new console release, we’ve reached a point where it is no longer sustainable to continue supporting the game with new content updates,” Amazon Games wrote in a blog post. “The recently launched Season 10 and Nighthaven update will serve as the final content release for New World on PC and consoles. It is only after much consideration that we’ve reached this decision.”

Players will still be able to buy New World for now, and it will remain available to PlayStation Plus subscribers on the Extra and Premium tiers “until further notice.” Amazon is making this month’s Nighthaven expansion available to everyone for free too.

The company said it will keep the game’s servers up and running through 2026, “allowing our community time to continue their adventures in Aeternum.” In terms of how long fans will be able to keep playing the game, Amazon said it will provide more details about “what to expect in the coming months.” It pledged to “provide a minimum of six months’ notice before making any changes that impact your ability to play New World: Aeternum.”

According to Bloomberg, Amazon told staff in a memo this week that, as part of widespread layoffs, it would dial back work on big-budget games, especially MMOs — a category that New World falls under. Updates for Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark — MMOS that Amazon publishes but are developed externally — will continue, the company confirmed to MassivelyOP. Amazon did not comment on the status of a planned Lord of the Rings MMO.

Amazon Games vice president Christoph Hartmann told me last year that Amazon started its big push into games with MMOs because it saw an opportunity. At the time, there weren’t too many titles in that genre popping up. However, he noted that “we’re evolving out of the MMOs” into other genres, hinting then that the division was changing focus. (Amazon’s first AAA game, the free-to-play shooter Crucible, didn’t last long after its debut in 2020.)

New World is still a popular game. It got off to a blistering start, with a peak concurrent player count of 914,000 on Steam. This past weekend, it at one point had nearly 50,000 concurrent players on that platform. It was also one of the highest grossing games on Steam in 2021.

And yet it seems that Amazon’s games division will now focus more on Luna, the cloud service for which it rolled out an overhaul just last week. It reportedly plans to keep releasing “casual and AI-focused games” for Luna, such as Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg, which puts an AI-generated version of the rapper in a Judge Judy-type role for court case-style debates between players. Amazon’s most recent game for PC and consoles is King of Meat, a co-op dungeon-building platformer that has so far reached a peak Steam concurrent player count of just 253.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-is-winding-down-its-still-popular-new-world-mmo-amid-mass-layoffs-150500426.html?src=rss

On Wednesday, Nvidia became the first company in history to reach a $5 trillion market capitalization, fresh on the heels of a GTC conference keynote in Washington, DC, where CEO Jensen Huang announced $500 billion in AI chip orders and plans to build seven supercomputers for the US government. The milestone comes a mere three months after Nvidia crossed the $4 trillion mark in July, vaulting the company past tech giants like Apple and Microsoft in market valuation but also driving continued fears of an AI investment bubble.

Nvidia’s shares have climbed nearly 12-fold since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, as the AI boom propelled the S&P 500 to record highs. Shares of Nvidia stock rose 4.6 percent on Wednesday following the Tuesday announcement at the company’s GTC conference. During a Bloomberg Television interview at the event, Huang dismissed concerns about overheated valuations, saying, “I don’t believe we’re in an AI bubble. All of these different AI models we’re using—we’re using plenty of services and paying happily to do it.”

Nvidia expects to ship 20 million units of its latest chips, compared to just 4 million units of the previous Hopper generation over its entire lifetime, Huang said at the conference. The $500 billion figure represents cumulative orders for the company’s Blackwell and Rubin processors through the end of 2026, though Huang noted that his projections did not include potential sales to China.

Read full article

Comments

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

If you’re in the market for a new Windows 11 laptop for everyday use that’s under $150, the bestselling Lenovo IdeaPad 1i 14″ Laptop is a smart choice – and right now, it’s $129 (originally $249.99) at Walmart. 

Lenovo IdeaPad 1i 14″ Laptop

$129.00
at Walmart

$249.99
Save $120.99

$129.00
at Walmart

$249.99
Save $120.99

Compared to the highly rated Lenovo IdeaPad 1 14, this version has more premium features and a more efficient processor. The laptop has a 14” HD display and two Dolby Audio speakers for rich sound. It comes with 128 GB of storage, 4 GB of RAM, and an Intel Celeron processor that enables multitasking with multi-screen capabilities. Four GB of non-upgradable RAM might mean that things get a bit sluggish if you have a lot of browser tabs or background apps open, but that’s to be expected at a sub-$150 price point.

On a full charge, the battery lasts around 11 hours, and with rapid charge boost, it provides just over two hours of extra juice. 128GB eMMC allows you to access and edit files when you’re offline (though it’s slower than a full SSD) and a feature called Flip to Start powers the laptop on as soon as you flip open the lid. It includes a 720p camera with a privacy shutter and Smart Noise Cancelling to reduce background noise during calls.  

If you don’t need a lot of storage (and don’t mind upgrade limitations), this ultra-budget Lenovo IdeaPad 1i 14″ Laptop is suitable for simple, everyday functionality. While it does come with its performance and hardware limitations and can’t compete with pricier powerhouse laptops, for $129, this entry-level laptop offers reliable value for budget-conscious buyers.

Since the dawn of civilization, leeches have been firmly attached to medicine. Therapeutic bloodsuckers are seen in murals decorating the tombs of 18^th dynasty Egyptian pharaohs. They got their earliest written recommendation in the 2^nd century BC by Greek poet and physician Nicander of Colophon. He introduced the “blood-loving leech, long flaccid and yearning for gore,” as a useful tool for sucking out poison after a bite from a poisonous animal. “Let leeches feed on [the] wounds and drink their fill,” he wrote. Ancient Chinese writing touted their medicinal potential, too, as did references in Sanskrit.

Galen, the physician for Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, supported using leeches to balance the four humors (i.e. blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile) and therefore treat ailments—as initially outlined by Hippocrates. Leeches, doctors found, provided a method for less painful, localized, and limited bloodletting. We now understand that leeches can release an anesthetic to prevent pain and a powerful anticoagulant, hirudin, to prevent clotting and keep blood flowing.

In the centuries since the Roman era, leeches’ popularity only grew. They were used to treat everything from gout to liver disease, epilepsy, and melancholy. The very word “leech” is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word “laece,” which translates to “physician.”

Read full article

Comments